What The Eff

Working in the visual arts can be a lonely experience. After completing an undergraduate degree at SVA, future Effi Briest songwriter and drummer Corinne Jones toiled away as a painter. The inherent creative confinement sparked an urge to push her art in a different direction, to connect with people and filter her impulses into a collaborative force. “It was so isolating, that way of working, and I needed to do something else, have another outlet,” she recalls over drinks at Soft Spot in Williamsburg. “So I just asked a lot of friends if they wanted to get together and make some noise with me.”

That noise manifested itself in Effi Briest, a six-piece collective named after the title character of Theodor Fontane’s 19th-century German novel. This is taut, muscular rock, pulled together from lengthy jam sessions and funneled into songs that feed off a broad range of influences. Guitarist Sara Shaw manages to channel the angular guitar lines of Magazine-era John McGeoch, while the clattering, dance-oriented percussion draws on subtle jazzy touches and crunchy hip hop-like beats, all tied together by the bone chilling range of vocalist Kelsey Barrett.

The members of Effi Briest are close friends who bring varying life experiences to the table— Shaw is a filmmaker in grad school whom Jones describes as “brilliant,” bassist Elizabeth Hart plays in Psychic Ills and recently traveled through India, and clarinet/accordion player Rebecca Squires runs the antique store Luddite in Williamsburg. As for Jones, her path into the arts was shaped by nascent childhood experiences in her home city of Memphis.

“It’s funny when you’re young, because your music is so tied up with your identity,” she says. “Being part of something clandestine was really important to me then. Fortunately, that wears off and you can let in everything, music-wise. Looking back and pigeonholing myself then, I can remember some of the better shows. The Cro-Mags, that was a really good one, and when I moved to New York I was lucky to catch Nirvana before they broke big, and Mudhoney—bands like that. I lived in Dallas for a short time when I was really young and saw Bad Brains and The Butthole Surfers, and that was very much life-affirming at the time.”

Jones initially siphoned her musical inclinations into writing lyrics for Effi Briest, but loosened her grip on that during the recording of the band’s forthcoming album, Rhizomes. “Kelsey has been writing more and more of the lyrics lately, I think that’s been important to her. In the past it was more important to all of us not to have a singular voice that was coming from the singer, but more of a group voice.”

Naturally, that group voice has already run into the full gamut of clichés in the male dominated music industry. “[People say] that we’re witches,” sighs Jones.” I haven’t heard that in a while, but initially we got a lot of that. I think it’s because we don’t look alike and we do have very different personalities, but we do all have long brown hair. So somehow that equals witches. And, of course, just the name ‘all-girl band’. You’d never say that about an all-male band, unless it’s a boy band, that type of music. We get asked to do photo shoots for these things where I feel like they just want more women around. For the most part, we’ve had a pretty good reception, especially considering we’re still without an album. For a band that’s taken forever to put out a record, we’ve done pretty well.”

A few singles and some supremely confident live shows provoked the initial buzz about the group circa 2007, but that was followed by a protracted silence that would have sounded the death knell for lesser talents. Fortunately, in an era of quick fix full-length albums shoved out to appease ever-decreasing attention spans, Effi Briest is a band that genuinely cares about its art. “We recorded it twice,” says Jones, of Rhizomes. “But it’s a better album for it. We were just really unsatisfied with the first recordings, and the availability of the engineer we were working with to finish the mixes, or even hear them. So we took a couple of the mixes to David Tolomei at DNA, and after working with him, we were like, ‘this is the guy.’ He really, really listened to us, and what sound we wanted, and he got that sound.”

The promo treadmill for Rhizomes may result in those irksome clichés intensifying once more, causing Jones to return to her photo shoot experiences: “People always want to put us in trees,” she laughs. “We were just joking about this last night. Why? Why are we always in a tree again?”

>Effi Briest Mar. 31, Mercury Lounge, 217 E. Houston St. (betw. Essex & Ludlow Sts.), 212-260-4700; 7:30, $10.